


Of Sea Foam Bathes and Sunlight Blankets

by okaymosshead



Category: One Piece
Genre: Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, I am so fascinated by Sanji’s past I love writing for him, Just some Late Night Thoughts, M/M, Mentions of past child abuse, Sanji has problems with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22783426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaymosshead/pseuds/okaymosshead
Summary: Sanji takes a moment to reflect on where he’s been, and where he is now.(Or, Sanji realizes much too late that a traveling pirate ship and it’s crew were more home than he could have ever asked for.)
Relationships: Roronoa Zoro/Vinsmoke Sanji
Comments: 12
Kudos: 175





	Of Sea Foam Bathes and Sunlight Blankets

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first OP fic (I’ve written a few here and there but never really posted)  
> Hope you all enjoy :)

Home. The word had always seemed foreign in his head, and had felt strange on his tongue, generally leaving a sour aftertaste. 

(And perhaps home wasn’t a place, but a person, and it had been him all along and always would be, like moss to a rolling stone he would hang on no matter the direction, and isn’t that what real love was?)

His body shone with sweat supplied by the thick air hanging in the cabin, his eyes settling into the confines of the dark room where only a few stray beams of moonlight managed to fall in.  
Some of the hammocks creaked with the waves in a gentle rhythm, giving his ringing ears something to focus on and slowly fade into the background.

Their heads lay close and he was suddenly conscious of his breath falling upon his bare shoulder, small puffs of air cooling the exposed flesh.  
Despite the heat slowly filling the corners of the room, they slept side by side, bodies pressed together in a tangle of long limbs and muscled features. His fingers twitched and he found himself running them through green tresses of hair, smooth and slightly wet from an ocean swim earlier. He imagined he sat at the edge of a lake, knees pressed to his chest, an outstretched hand running through the algae that rested above the water’s surface. 

His tired eyes battled with his brain to succumb to the darkness of the room together, but with his wary heart and jumbled thoughts sleep came as a stranger to him.  
He shifted slightly, his gaze settling over the lines in the wood etched in the ceiling; mentally picking out each individual curve, noting the darker spots where it had once grown somewhere else yet had now come to lay to rest on his ceiling. (All things would begin and end, and boy, was that thought ever startling.)  
Some nights, much like this one, he struggled to sleep when his head threatened to lay its contents bare and expose what lie beneath the murky waters of his memory. Often he found himself afraid of what he knew was already there. Remembering was tireless and painful, a chore his brain placed upon him when his surroundings were quiet and no new stimuli could be taken in as a distraction.

However, much like the waves of his ocean all of it (everything he wanted to deny and forget) would be washed to shore, tied up in the sea foam and released onto the sand to lay bare at the mercy of the sun’s rays above.  
His thoughts drifted to before Sunny, to before Merry and the restaurant and to where a little boy had begun a life in shame; where his dreams occupied dark corners of dungeon cells to be locked away for eternity.

He thought of his mother and her golden hair much like his. For awhile he was sure his father had resented him merely for the fact that he looked like her, even though he often despised his own features for coming close to anything that resembled his father.  
His mind wanders to small legs curled in her lap, head resting upon her shoulder, a soft hand with long fingers threading through his tangled hair, carefully removing the knots until he was smoothed out again and again. Her smile healed the bruises his brothers had punched and kicked into his chest in various hues of blues and purples. She would wrap her arms around him, gently rocking him until his eyelids betrayed him by slipping closed, and as they began to shut she’d sing a soft melody he would never forget yet never be able to replicate, a song clutching at the edges of his memory desperate to just remember the comfort of a mother’s love.  
He thought of his father ripping him from her warm embrace, throwing him to the wolves as some sort of sick joke, some mad experiment with the same result. They say to do something over and over and expect different endings is insanity and he could sense the sticky heat of his rage that lapped at the bottoms of his exposed feet as he was hung out to dry for his brothers to torment to their pleasure. He was shocked they never beat him to death, and long ago he found himself sometimes secretly wishing they had. Had they not all displayed the same crooked six upon their brows he would have swore that they were not brothers (and were they, even?)  
A grunt next to him knocked him back into reality, his reddened cheeks beginning to subside to light pinks when he remembered where he was. The nausea that had crept up on him was slowly subsiding, yet he still felt afraid. His breathes stumbled out haphazardly, and the arm around his waist seemed to sense the change and clutched him closer. The tightness of the grasp forced a lump into his throat, his vision blurring at the affection, his cheeks wet with a gratitude he was sure he could never repay in a thousand lifetimes; he felt unworthy of love yet only wanted to surround others in his own. At times the care his crew mates gave to him as though it were only natural made him feel as though he was drowning. He thought back to his sister, hands firm on trembling shoulders, promising him that the sea held people who would care for him, and at the time he was sure she was only lying to make sure he left fast enough. If he wasn’t too careful he may just begin to believe her (and hadn’t he already fallen for their love and affection?).

Home was a complicated concept. But maybe, just maybe, he had already found it.

Perhaps home was meals greedily scarfed down, proclamations of his cooking held to the highest esteem, not a crumb left upon any surface. Sometimes it was cookbooks and exotic fruits and vegetables purchased on whatever island they were moored at, lovingly placed on the kitchen counter awaiting his careful experimentation. The warmth that spread over his chest as careful hands (hooves?) patched him up and gently pushed him back to bed, begging him to please rest, please lay down—maybe home lies there, tangled in the sickbay sheets as they took turns watching over him as he slept. He felt at home in their laughter and undying love for one another, and the foreign feeling was dizzying.

And he was so loved by them all, perhaps some even more than others. 

His love was sturdy, unmoving like the mountain of a man he was, so sure of himself. When chapped lips had met his own, his heart had skydived, and he was sure any minute he would wake up again in that dark dungeon, another dream that would lay dormant in daydreams and nightmares. His first thought had been to hide from the rain, but the storm had caught up to him and he was swept away. 

They had had a rocky start, the bottoms of his feet clashing against metal. He had never held back, had never regarded him as less. Never saw him as his father’s experimental failure, the lab rat he was. Perhaps he had fallen for him through well aimed insults and a push of his lower leg against the metal over and over again until they had both wrung themselves dry. Underneath it all he had loved him, and would love him until he died and they lowered his body into the sea where he had been born long past his escape from his mother’s embrace and his father’s deathly stare. 

Eventually their love would grow and he would find its vines climbing unaided towards the sun, longing for its warmth. One night during his watch they had shared a drink and he had overshared what his heart beat for. The mast had felt cool on the back of his head, but the hands in his hair and the lips on his were warm, setting him ablaze—reigniting a fire he had thought to be snuffed out forever.

A few tears betrayed him, falling past his cheek and drenching the arm that hung across him, his own version of the gallows because together he had died and had been reborn again and again and in these arms he would one day meet his maker. This was home. Home was long scraggly scars that held proof of his loyalty and determination, home culminated in his firm hands that could simultaneously cut steel and yet gently clasp his own hand. He often caught him absentmindedly running his fingers through his hair, and the intensity of his touch would leave his hands trembling, bringing him back to distant memories that now only seemed to be whispers. He had starved once and would surely succumb to starvation again, as he longed for the love that was offered to him, never wavering.

As he stared at the ceiling, having lost count of the individual notches in each wooden plank, his heart ached for him. He was surprised it’s screaming had not awoken the other occupants of the beds beside them. He thought of all he had been through to arrive at this point, and he shook at the unwavering fact that he would do it again and again if only to see him at the end of it all.

A calloused hand reached up, a thumb scrubbing at the tears that cornered themselves at the edges of his eyes, blurring his vision. The body next to him shifted until he was sitting up, wordlessly drawing him in. Soft circles rubbed into his back in the shapes of small puddles of rain brought him back, and he was home again no matter what his mind dared to say. As if he could decipher the erratic beatings of his heart and decode the beading sweat on the back of his neck, those same hands ran through his hair more gently than they should have. He shuddered at the touch, falling into him only to be held just as close. While he couldn’t decipher the comforting words lips had pressed into his neck, they echoed into him and grounded him until the foundation began to pull itself back together. 

His home was here in his touch, and the blanket of sunlight that fell upon them as they laid shoulder to shoulder above deck, and the lapping of sea foam against his toes as they sat half in sand and half in water, and even in the crook of his arms scented with sandalwood and vanilla soap. He could bury his face in his neck forever had his traitorous lungs not needed the oxygen and his greedy hands not insisted on caressing his cheek and tracing his scars.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I’m going to be just fine.”

“I love you, you know that?”

And of course he had known, as his soft snores confirmed against his shoulder. He had finally found home.


End file.
